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Facebook makes the wrong decision, totally screws early adopters.

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Facebook Pages is the future. Seriously, it’s amazing. Scoble wrote a sweet article defending the recent facebook redesign which I don’t want to rewrite — so go read it.


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Here’s what I do want to talk about: All of the people who have become fans of your pages before yesterday will not see your updates in their newsfeed. Have you already built an awesome audience on Facebook?  Well, you’ve just lost a big access point to all of them! Forever!  Want photo proof?

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This makes sense if users didn’t intend to give that permission and have fanned a ton of pages (like me, with 165 pages I’ve fanned, I’m not excited about the prospect of seeing them all in my feed), but because most users aren’t fans of that many pages, and most of them will never take the chance to opt-in if it’s not made easy for them, the default should be on with opt-out capability. Or, if Facebook wanted to build the best experience it should ask the user to assign posting privilages to all pages that they previously fanned using a gloabl setting (which a user could edit settings later for individual pages).

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Thanks Facebook, I’m glad to see I just lost access to the vast majority of the 71 fans of Tyler Willis. Luckily, I’m not the New York Times and didn’t just get screwed out of 362,387 fans. Good job ‘book.

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